On belonging to a country that cannot keep its children

“You've wasted the (people with) talents and given them to the foreigners" said a prominent banner in downtown Beirut on the very first day of the uprising. It made the Lebanese government responsible for the ‘brain drain’ caused by ongoing migration, and declared the latter a problem that could be avoided if it wasn't for the mismanagement of the economy by the political and economic governing elite.

I have noticed with interest the extent to which migration figured as a lament 'look what you are making us do', as problem 'our youth are all leaving' and a sign of governmental disfunction 'we shouldn't have to leave', in the discourse of the Lebanese uprising. 

Sometimes, migration has been a factor in the uprising without people being conscious of it as such. Take the way Tripoli, the capital of northern Lebanon has risen in prominence as one of epicentres of the protests. Tripoli for so long perceived by Beirutis as a poor, underdeveloped part of the country, festering with backwardness, poverty and Islamic fundamentalism rose in ways no one imagined it to be capable of. Not only did thousands descended to the capital's main square rejecting traditional sectarian politics just as much if not more so than they did in Beirut. They did so with style leaving Beirutis literally speechless: a local rapper got everyone grooving in the square. They were at it in their thousands and it was incredible to watch. A story that is not told is that these features of Tripoli's 'modernity' are impossible to disentangle from it being one of the key centres of migration to Australia and where Australian Lebanese continuously return. Tripoli has a rugby league team, hardly a home grown sport and it is impossible to go to Tripoli without hearing people speaking English with an Australian accent. And while the research is yet to be done, I would think that Tripoli's uprising is a diasporic phenomenon through and through. But so is Beirut's. I have often sat at street meetings where the conversation had to happen in English because the participants'm Lebanese wasn't good enough.

And yet, the man in the dark photo below was screaming "I don’t want to be in a situation where my relatives ring me and say 'your father's not doing so well' and I am too far to be able to do anything". The discourse about migration being something bad that happens to you has always been present in Lebanon, but it often took the back seat to an opposite celebratory discourse: migration as a sign of the Lebanese's adventurous and ambitious character something that runs in the Lebanese blood and has been inherited since the times of those trading, adventurous and ambitious Phoenicians. The uprising has definitely brought the discourse of migration as a social pathology to the forefront. One can hear it everywhere: we are demonstrating because "we're sick and tired to have to migrate", "I have just got my degree, why should I be looking for a job outside of Lebanon" and then there is this guy with a placard stating the names of all of his friends who have migrated and telling them that he is demonstrating 'because we want you back'.

But it was the woman holding a sign stating that she is demonstrating ‘For every drop of tears that has fallen at the airport’ that broke me. For the sign points not so much at a social problem but at a primal injury that is at the heart of Lebanon's diasporic culture. I have spent so much of my academic life researching this primal injury, that manifests itself most clearly precisely at the airport when one sees parents cry as they say goodbye to their children. I have analysed this injury but i've also analysed the Lebanese art of acting as if there is no injury at all, a whole culture of dissimulation that is itself a symptom of the depth of the injury.

For a time, I used to wonder at the reason why Lebanese migrants, despite their propensity to narcissistically over-valorise themselves and their achievements, always betrayed a sense of inferiority in the face of the inhabitants of the lands to which they migrated. I used to think that it was an internalisation of a developmental racism which made so many of them see westerners as superior. But then, not only was this shown to be again and again not true, it also failed to explain the presence of this sense of inferiority to people they actually racialise, people who they deemed in a racist way civilisationally inferior. Slowly the source of this sense of inferiority became clear. The immigrant might do very well socially and economically compared to the locally born but nothing will alter the simple fact that unlike the local, the immigrant belongs to a country that could not care for them. Or as put to me poetically by a Venezuelan Lebanese informant once: 'we are the people whose country could not keep them.' 

The bringing of this wound into the open is part of the incredible socio-political but also psychological 'revolution against one's own self' that's been unfolding in the streets of Beirut since the 17th of October.

That the President of the Republic allowed himself to tell the demonstrators a variant of the 'if you don't like it here leave' is a sign of how remote and disengaged from popular sensibilities this whole regime has been.

Hizbollah, zionism, geopolitics and democracy

As people in the Arab world increasingly face their destructive, corrupt and incompetent ruling classes, we should have no time for anyone who denies that Western Imperialism and Zionism remain the single most poisonous reality affecting all of the Arab world. But we also should have no time for those who use this to let the destructive, corrupt and incompetent ruling class continue in its rule. So much was made clear during the Arab Spring.

We should have no time for anyone who denies that Arab Nationalist movements emerged with a genuine desire to struggle against anti-imperialism and Zionism. But we should have no time for anyone who denies that Arab Nationalist movements failed to defeat Zionism and Arab nationalism became an ideology of elite reproduction and nothing more.

We should have no time for those who cannot see that zionism and imperialism have to be resisted at a macro, geo-political level. but we should also have no time for anyone who cannot see how geopolitical anti-zionism and anti-imperialism became, particularly in Iraq, in Syria and in Libya, the ideology for the perpetuation of international, regional and local economic and geopolitical interests that increasingly accommodated itself with a perpetual modus vivendi with Western imperialism and zionism and had little to do with the struggle against them.

The same goes for Lebanon. We should have no time for anyone who denies that Hizbollah and Hassan Nasrallah have a heroic past freeing Lebanon from Zionist occupation, for which all Lebanese should all be grateful. And we should have no time for those who think that Lebanon is better off without a resistance movement. But we should have no time for the pontifications of Hassan Nasrallah at the moment: While, in the short term, he certainly has traced a new heroic path of resistance to zionism, in the long term, he is walking along the same old well-worn path of the primacy of geopolitical anti-imperialist and anti-zionist sloganeering at the expense of people's aspirations for a decent life. 

Despite the tragic and murderous consequences of its Syrian involvement, for which it should one day be held accountable, there is still time for the resistance to trace for itself a path that differs from all the resistances that have preceded it.

We should have no time for anyone who denies that Hizbollah as a resistance movement has a better chance of contributing to the defeat of zionism, if that is really its main concern, if it allies itself to the Lebanese and to other Arab world's popular uprisings rather than struggle against them. It can also help protect those movement form zionism which will no doubt attack them when they look successful.

But at the moment we should have no time for anyone who denies that Hizbollah is moving in the same direction as Arab Nationalist movements before it prioritising the geopolitical and economic interests of its' own elite and that of it's international backers. That is, like all the Arab nationalist movements before it Hizbollah's anti-imperialism and anti-zionism have turned into a defence of an established elite and of a sclerotic geo-political status-quo. 

And we should say this as people who, let us repeat, have no time for anyone who denies that Western Imperialism and Zionism remain the single most poisonous reality affecting all of the Arab world.

على شفير الهاوية /“On the brink of the abyss” (English translation follows arabic text)

أنا عادة لا أكتب باللغة العربية. لكنني أريد أن أفعل ذلك لأن هذه القطعة مكتوبة على أنها نوع من ال 'شكراً' و 'merci كتير' للشعب اللبناني الذي منحني تجربة الانتفاضة أثناء وجودي في لبنان
و إذا كان في كلمات و جمل غلط.، طوّلو بالكم علينا ؛) 

هناك شيء جديد على ارض لبنان. لنفهم ابعاده علينا ان نفهم ما هو قديم. منذ صغري ولبنان ينتقل من أزمة إلى أزمة. ولدت سنة ١٩٥٧ و ما ان بدأت أتنفس حتى 'غطّسوني' بحرب ال٥٨ الأهلية. و من وقتها الأزمات لم تتوقف.

و ما يميّز الأزمات اللبنانية عن غيرها أنها في كل مرة هناك أزمة يأتي أشخاص، سياسيين و صحافيين ومفكرين، يحاولون إقناعنا انه 'هل مرّة الأزمة حادة و نحن على شفير الهاوية'. وتمرّ أزمة وتأتي أزمة جديدة وأحيانًا نفس الأشخاص يعودون يقولولن لنا 'انّو هالمرّة غير شي، وانو صحيح في عالم قالو من زمان انه نحنا كنّا على شفير الهاوية، بس هالمرة كتير غير شي، هالمرّة نحنا حقيقةً على شفير الهاوية'.

و حتًّى أيام الحرب الأهلية لما كنّا 'بنص دين الهاوية' كان هناك أشخاص يقولون 'انو اسّا في هاوية أعظم من هيك بكتير، و لازم ننتبه، لانّو نحنا هالمرّة 'حقيقةً، حقيقةً' على شفير الهاوية'. وهكذا بقينا بعد الحرب ايضاً ننتقل من شفير هاوية لشفير هاوية. 

تخيّل الأزمات السياسية والاقتصادية وحتى الأزمات البيئية بانها أزمات تضعنا على شفير الهاوية تخلق مناخ و ثقافة سياسية يصعب فيها التفكير في المستقبل بطريقة خلّاقة. فبلد 'على شفير الهاوية' مثل مريضة في حالة خطرة في المستشفى. لا يمكن ان نجلس معها ونتكلم عن مشاريع مستقبليّة. جلّ ما نتمنّى لها هو ان تبقى على قيد الحياة. و في لبنان كذلك بفضل تخيّلنا لنفسنا باننا على شفير الهاوية بشكل دايم أصبحنا نفتقر إلى فكر مستقبلي. كل ما يمكننا ان نفعله هو ان نستيقظ في الصباح و نهنّأ نفسنا: "شي لا يصدق! نحن لم ننفرط و نتفكك تماما بعد. الحمد لله". 

لهذا يمكننا ان نعتبر ان الفكر الذي يضعنا دائماً أمام شفير الهاوية كغيره من الافكار التي تضعنا أما كارثة وشيكة هو نوع من اداة تحكّم تعمل لكبح ولجم الخيال السياسي المستقبلي. فكرة 'إلخطر الوجودي' في إسرئيل مثلا تلعب الدور نفسه في إفقار الثقافة السياسية ومنع ظهور أي فكر يعبر عن إمكانية التغيير الاجتماعي جذري أو طفيف. ونرى شيء على هذا الشبه يمتد في ثقافات الأحزاب السياسية اللبنانية وخاصة ثقافة حزب الله.

كل هذا للفت النظر إلى الأزمة المرتبطة بالانتفاضة اللبنانية اليوم. فبدلًا من أزمة يشعر المرء بأنه يتعرض لها رغم ارادته و هي تتحرك بواسطة قوى خارجة عن سيطرته، لدينا هنا أزمة صنعها الشعب اللبناني بنفسه. واهم ما يميز هذه الأزمة هو انها لا تضعنا على شفير الهاوية ولا تلجم خيالنا السياسي بل بالعكس، نرى كل يوم و على ارض الانتفاضة نفسها مهرجان إبداع اجتماعي ثقافي و سياسي يرافقه ظهور العديد من الآفاق السياسية الجديدة. حتى لو لم يتمكنوا من تحقيق أي شيء آخر ، يجب أن نكون ممتنين إلى الأبد لأبطال انتفاضة ١٧ تشرين الاوّل
لتحرير خيالنا السياسي، حتى لو لفترة قصيرة، من كابوس 'شفير الهاوية'.

I dont usually write in Arabic. But I wanted to write this in Arabic because this piece is written as a kind of 'thank you' and ‘merci kteer’ to those Lebanese people who gave me the experience of an uprising while in Lebanon this October 2019. 

There is something new developing on the ground in Lebanon. To understand its newness and ramifications we have to understand the old. 

Since I was a child Lebanon has continuously moved from one crisis to another. I was born in 1957 and no sooner had I started breathing than I was in the thick of the 1958 civil war. Since that time crises have never stopped.

What distinguishes the Lebanese crises from others is that every time there is a crisis we get an assortment of people, politicians, journalists and intellectuals, trying to convince us that 'the crisis is particularly severe’ and ‘we are on the brink of the abyss'. Then, as we move from one old crisis to a new one, sometimes those same people come back and tell us, that this time its really different, and the crisis is really particularly severe’ and ‘we are genuinely on the brink of the absyss.’ 

Even in the days of the Civil War, when we were in what one would think right ‘in the middle of the abyss' there were people who were saying 'There’s a far greater abyss, and we need to pay attention, because this time we are really really really  'on the brink of the abyss'. After the war, in much the same way, we kept moving from one brink of the abyss to another.

Imagining political, economic and even environmental crises as always putting us on the brink, creates a climate and a political culture in which the future is difficult to think creatively. A country 'on the brink' is like a seriously ill patient in hospital, someone deemed to be ‘in a critical condition’. We do not sit in an intensive care ward with such a patient and talk to her about future projects. All we wish for her is to manage to stay alive and get better. In Lebanon, too, thanks to our own perception of being continuously on the verge of a precipice, we have been lacking in new future-directed political thought. All we do is wake up in the morning and congratulate ourselves: "Unbelievable! We have not completely disintegrated yet. Thank God for that."

That is why we can consider that this kind of thinking that always puts us before the brink of the abyss, and all ideas that position us before an imagined imminent catastrophe, as a governmental technique aimed at restraining the political imagination and limiting our capacity for thinking different radical futures. The notion of 'existential danger' in Israel, for example, plays the same role in impoverishing political culture and preventing the emergence of any thought that expresses the possibility of radical or even minor social change. We see something similar in the cultures of Lebanese political parties, especially that of Hezbollah.

All this to draw attention to the crisis associated with the Lebanese uprising today. Instead of a crisis that one finds oneself in against one’s will and that is moved by forces beyond one’s control, here we have a crisis that the Lebanese people have created and brought about themselves. And indeed, the most important characteristic of this crisis is that, precisely, it does not put us on the brink of the abyss, and it does not curb our political imagination. Quite the contrary, the uprising has been a festival of social, cultural and political creativity that is continuously opening up new political horizons. Even if they cannot achieve anything else, we must be eternally grateful to the heroes of the October 17 uprising for having freed our political imagination, even if for a short time, from the nightmare of the 'brink of the abyss'.